24 Nov
2003
24 Nov
'03
1:12 p.m.
Inspired by the Vocaloid thread, an old idea sprung back to mind;
retro "chip style" speech synthesis.
Is there a simple, minimalistic, Free/Open Source phoneme-to-audio
synthesiser out there? I'm not terribly interested in the
text-to-phonemes part and other higher level stuff, as I intend to
use this for sound effects in games and (other) toys. Doesn't hurt if
CPU and memory requirements are very low, but I'm probably going to
render words and phrases off-line anyway (at install or load time),
for later processing as normal sound effects.
//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
.- Audiality -----------------------------------------------.
| Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia. |
| MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... |
`-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -'
--- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---
24 Nov
24 Nov
2:17 p.m.
On Monday 24 November 2003 14:11, David Olofson wrote:
Inspired by the Vocaloid thread, an old idea sprung
back to mind;
retro "chip style" speech synthesis.
Is there a simple, minimalistic, Free/Open Source phoneme-to-audio
synthesiser out there? I'm not terribly interested in the
text-to-phonemes part and other higher level stuff, as I intend to
use this for sound effects in games and (other) toys. Doesn't hurt if
CPU and memory requirements are very low, but I'm probably going to
render words and phrases off-line anyway (at install or load time),
for later processing as normal sound effects.
//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
There is the venerable rsynth proggie. It's really old but it's fun
to put the ouput through filters and stuff..
Stil though, it talks very strange...
There is also a smaller/reduced version of festival you can try out,
but i forgot how it is called.
Juan Linietsky
2:43 p.m.
Hi list,
Juan wrote:
I was wondering for a while when some older geek will start
porting/rewriting e.g. the old Amiga's narrator.device for Linux - or,
even more retro, what about S.A.M. (Software Automatic Mouth) from the
8-bit Atari machines, dated around 1985? Ah, those were the times.. :-)
Frank
Inspired by
the Vocaloid thread, an old idea sprung back to mind;
retro "chip style" speech synthesis.
Is there a simple, minimalistic, Free/Open Source phoneme-to-audio
synthesiser out there? I'm not terribly interested in the
text-to-phonemes part and other higher level stuff, as I intend to
use this for sound effects in games and (other) toys. Doesn't hurt if
CPU and memory requirements are very low, but I'm probably going to
render words and phrases off-line anyway (at install or load time),
for later processing as normal sound effects.
There is the venerable rsynth proggie. It's really old but it's fun
to put the ouput through filters and stuff..
Stil though, it talks very strange...
There is also a smaller/reduced version of festival you can try out,
but i forgot how it is called.
3:23 p.m.
On Monday 24 November 2003 19.42, Frank Neumann wrote:
[...]
I was wondering for a while when some older geek will
start
porting/rewriting e.g. the old Amiga's narrator.device for Linux -
Actually, I was surfing around, looking for that a moment ago. Can't
seem to find any source code, though. (Didn't really expect to.) Is
it available?
or, even more retro, what about S.A.M. (Software
Automatic Mouth)
from the 8-bit Atari machines, dated around 1985? Ah, those were
the times.. :-)
Yeah, that's another though... I guess one way would be to replace the
synthesis stage of some current TTS system with a chip emulator style
synth. Or how about hacking a LADSPA or JACK wrapper that generates
control output that you can use to drive a modular synth?
//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
.- Audiality -----------------------------------------------.
| Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia. |
| MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... |
`-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -'
--- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---
25 Nov
25 Nov
5:40 a.m.
On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 08:21:55 +0100, David Olofson wrote:
On Monday 24 November 2003 19.42, Frank Neumann
wrote:
[...]
IIRC if was partly hardware - possibly just the phonomes blown onto a chip
- but you could look in one of the amiga emulator packages.
I was wondering for a while when some older geek
will start
porting/rewriting e.g. the old Amiga's narrator.device for Linux -
Actually, I was surfing around, looking for that a moment ago. Can't
seem to find any source code, though. (Didn't really expect to.) Is
it available? Yeah, that's another though... I guess one way
would be to replace the
synthesis stage of some current TTS system with a chip emulator style
synth. Or how about hacking a LADSPA or JACK wrapper that generates
control output that you can use to drive a modular synth?
You can do fun things with formant filters (vowel peaks - theres a dial
that goes from A to EE) and envelope sequencers.
If there isn't a formant filter for LADSPA allready available someone
should make one - the tables of co-efficients are available online.
- Steve
10:13 a.m.
On Tuesday 25 November 2003 10.39, Steve Harris wrote:
I've seen some formant filter code somewhere... Can't remember if it
was a LADSPA plugin, though.
Anyway, formant filters might actually be a bit too sophisticated for
what I want to do. I'd prefer something more similar to speech
synthesis on old hybrid sound chips, like the 6581; that is, PWM, S&H
noise and possibly a simple resonant filter.
I've played some with *really* simple stuff, doing PWM on the PC
speaker, and it's not too bad. "Colored" noise for the plosives is
easy (PWM with random phase), and you can get a few vowels from just
pure PWM. Adding an LPF, or alternative waveforms might do the trick.
(A bit tricky to do with the PC speaker, of course, so I didn't try
it back then. ;-)
//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
.- Audiality -----------------------------------------------.
| Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia. |
| MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... |
`-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -'
--- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---
On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 08:21:55 +0100, David Olofson
wrote:
I looked pretty carefully at the docs and schematics back when I was
hacking on the Amiga, and I never saw anything but the Paula chip (4
simple hardware DAC voices) when it comes to audio. I'm quite sure
narrator.device used only the standard audio output driver.
On Monday 24 November 2003 19.42, Frank Neumann
wrote:
[...]
IIRC if was partly hardware - possibly just the phonomes blown onto
a chip - but you could look in one of the amiga emulator packages. I was wondering for a while when some older geek
will start
porting/rewriting e.g. the old Amiga's narrator.device for
Linux -
Actually, I was surfing around, looking for that a moment ago.
Can't seem to find any source code, though. (Didn't really expect
to.) Is it available? Yeah,
that's another though... I guess one way would be to
replace the synthesis stage of some current TTS system with a
chip emulator style synth. Or how about hacking a LADSPA or JACK
wrapper that generates control output that you can use to drive a
modular synth?
You can do fun things with formant filters (vowel peaks - theres a
dial that goes from A to EE) and envelope sequencers.
If there isn't a formant filter for LADSPA allready available
someone should make one - the tables of co-efficients are available
online. 
7:15 a.m.
Frank Neumann wrote:
I was wondering for a while when some older geek will start
porting/rewriting e.g. the old Amiga's narrator.device for Linux - or,
even more retro, what about S.A.M. (Software Automatic Mouth) from the
8-bit Atari machines, dated around 1985? Ah, those were the times.. :-)
Here's a link to S.A.M (don't know what the diskette contains):
http://retrobits.net/sam.html
Uwe Koloska
--
voiceINTERconnect www.voiceinterconnect.de
... smart speech applications from germany
24 Nov
24 Nov
3:17 p.m.
On Tuesday 25 November 2003 19.19, Juan Linietsky wrote:
[...]
There is the venerable rsynth proggie. It's really
old but it's fun
to put the ouput through filters and stuff..
Stil though, it talks very strange...
Funny. Very small. C. Seems to be 100% public domain. Might work. :-)
There is also a smaller/reduced version of festival
you can try
out, but i forgot how it is called.
Looked at that, but it's still too big and too "serious" for my needs.
//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
.- Audiality -----------------------------------------------.
| Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia. |
| MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... |
`-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -'
--- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---
7:10 p.m.
Juan Linietsky wrote:
[...] There is also a smaller/reduced version of
festival you can try out,
but i forgot how it is called.
"Flite"
http://fife.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite
Simon Jenkins
(Bristol, UK)
7:27 p.m.
On Mon, 2003-11-24 at 17:11, David Olofson wrote:
Is there a simple, minimalistic, Free/Open Source
phoneme-to-audio
synthesiser out there?
Well, it's not open, or free, but it's damn impressive:
http://www.research.ibm.com/tts/coredemo.html
-Lea.
7625
days inactive
7626
days old
linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org
9 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
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David Olofson -
Frank Neumann -
Juan Linietsky -
Simon Jenkins -
Steve Harris -
Stonekeeper -
Uwe Koloska